This is an interview with Joe Harper, Co-Founder Just Bee Honey
Can you tell us about the history of the business and about the journey from failed drinks startup to a £10m business?
It’s a funny one, because I grew up scared of bees. My grandad was a beekeeper in Northern Ireland and my dad kept bees when I was growing up in Lancashire. But I got stung as a child, so I was a bit scared of bees, and I didn’t even like honey!
Andy, my co-founder, and I were working as accountants when we decided we wanted to build something of our own around health and wellbeing. In 2015 we launched Just Bee as a honey-sweetened drinks company, using honey from my dad’s hives. We quit our jobs and moved into a flat together in central Manchester so we could work on the business around the clock. We ended up living together for five years.
From day one we also had a mission to Save the Bees, and we’ve included a free packet of bee-friendly wildflower seeds with every order ever since.
The drinks won listings and press attention, and we sold over a million of them, but commercially it never quite worked. Then COVID arrived and wiped out around 80% of our revenue in a matter of days as hospitality and retail closed their doors. We had a choice: shut the company down or reinvent it.
During the first lockdown, Andy and I started blending wellness honey at home ourselves, often working through the night to keep up. People were searching for natural ways to support their immunity, and our blend of acacia honey with lemon, ginger, vitamins and echinacea took off almost immediately. We turned an abandoned serviced office in Manchester into a makeshift honey factory and hired people who had lost work in the pandemic just to keep pace with orders.
That first blend became the blueprint for everything Just Bee is today: premium acacia honey combined with vitamins and botanicals to support everyday health needs like immunity, sleep, energy and gut health. A simple, natural and delicious alternative to pills and powders.
Five years of struggle turned into the fastest growth we’d ever seen. Today Just Bee is a £10 million wellness business with more than 30 employees, over 450,000 customers and more than 1.2 million pots sold in the last twelve months, and we were named in The Sunday Times 100 Fastest Growing Companies 2026. We’ve also helped plant over 200 million wildflowers across the UK.
How have you funded the growth of the business?
Andy and I put £66,000 of our own money in to get started, and we raised £650,000 from seven angel investors during the early years. Since 2021 the business has been profitable, and we haven’t taken any outside investment since. All of our growth is now funded from our own profits.
We also pitched on Dragons’ Den in 2017, and Peter Jones made us an offer, which we turned down. The investment wasn’t right for us at the time, but the exposure was brilliant for the brand. It put us in front of millions of people and brought a wave of new customers, job applicants and investor interest.
The hardest funding moment actually came later. When COVID hit and we proposed switching the whole business from drinks to wellness honey, not all of our investors agreed. It was a heated debate and it went all the way to a board vote, which we won, but only just. That vote changed the course of the company.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced?
The first five years were one long lesson in failure. We had listings, national press, even that Dragons’ Den offer, but the product didn’t have strong enough market fit. The hardest thing was admitting that to ourselves and finding the courage to start again.
The challenge now is completely different. We’ve created a brand new category, wellness honey, and it sits between food and supplements, so there’s no shelf, no playbook and no competitor to learn from.
Most wellness products come as pills, powders and capsules, and most honey brands compete on provenance or price. We have to educate people that honey can be a genuine daily wellness ritual, something that supports your immunity, sleep or gut health and that you actually look forward to taking. That’s the hard part, and it’s also why the opportunity is so big.
What does the future hold for the business?
The next chapter is retail. We’ve spent six years proving the model online, with hundreds of thousands of repeat customers and counting, and from 2027 we’ll be bringing Just Bee onto shelves so millions more people can discover us, starting with health-focused retailers. Alongside that, we’re developing new blends for a much broader set of everyday health needs, and longer term we’ll look at international markets.
The headline target is £25 million in revenue by 2029. But the measure I care about most is habit: how many people start their morning with a spoonful of Just Bee.
The bigger ambition is cultural. Wellness has become complicated and expensive, and a lot of people feel priced out of it. We want to be the brand that strips all that back and makes looking after yourself feel as simple, natural and enjoyable as putting the kettle on.